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Cheese Crusts
Cut thin slices of bread into fingers, butter them and toast over a clear fire. Sprinkle each piece very thickly with grated cheese, dust with paprika and place in a hot oven until the cheese is melted, then serve.
A four-line savoury that needs almost nothing translated, but a few details of the original method are worth pinning down.
- "A clear fire"This means an open coal or wood fire burnt down past the smoke to a steady glow, held in front of the bars on a toasting fork. A grill/broiler on high gives the same dry, direct heat; a toaster works but browns both sides evenly rather than crisping the cut surface.
- Hot ovenIn period terms this is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. At that sort of heat the cheese should melt in a few minutes, before the toast dries out further.
- Bread and cutThe recipe says only "thin slices" cut into fingers; strips roughly an inch wide from a thinly cut slice are a reasonable reading. A close-crumbed white loaf, slightly stale, holds up better than an airy modern sandwich loaf.
- The cheeseThe recipe specifies only grated cheese, which implies something firm and dry enough to grate. A high-moisture cheese will weep oil and slide off the finger. Grate it fine so it melts before the toast scorches.
- Butter first, then toastThe recipe does put the butter on before the toasting, unusual as that looks. No reason is given, though buttering first does let the fat soak in and colour the surface. Follow the order as written.
- PaprikaIn books of this period this generally meant the mild sweet Hungarian pepper, used as much for the red colour as for heat. Modern smoked paprika will read as a very different dish; sweet paprika is the closer choice.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities. Dishes of this kind were served hot as a savoury at the end of dinner or alongside soup, and they want to go to the table straight from the oven; they turn leathery quickly.
Cheese on toast in its various guises -- Welsh rabbit, cheese straws, cheese crusts, cheese fingers -- appears in late-Victorian and Edwardian household books because of the savoury, the small hot salty course served after the sweet at a formal dinner, a habit particularly associated with English and Anglo-American dining of the period. Recipes of this kind also earned their place as a use for the tail end of a loaf and the dry rind of a cheese, and many of them specify grated rather than sliced cheese. The paprika is the modern touch here: Hungarian pepper became widely available to English-speaking cooks in the later nineteenth century and turns up in books of this era as a gentler, prettier alternative to the cayenne that older cheese-toast recipes call for.